Word: astronaut
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Give the folks at NASA this much - they know how to close ranks. Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak was arrested this week and charged with attempted murder after driving 900 miles from Houston to Orlando, Fla., allegedly carrying a knife, a BB gun, pepper spray, latex gloves and rubber tubing-wearing a diaper all the while so she wouldn't have to stop en route-and assaulting a romantic rival in a parking lot. After all that, NASA spokesman James Hartsfield assured the press: "Her status as an astronaut is currently unchanged." If crazy doesn't get you bumped from...
...that it won't be told and told and told again by cable, tabs and blogs. The truly meaningful question is why that unraveling happened at all. Annapolis grads and shuttle jocks aren't supposed to come unglued. And NASA, a brutally Darwinian place that has been screening astronauts for almost 50 years, is not supposed to let loose screws through. Is NASA not as good at this as we thought? Are astronauts more destructible souls than they seem? And what does all this say about the weight-bearing ability of any human mind when the load grows too great...
...Sundance 2007 was a filmmaker's market as 13 movies sold in the feverish first six days of the festival. Sons of Rambow, a British comedy about a boy's obsession with the movie First Blood, sold to Paramount Vantage for just under $8 million; ThinkFilm picked up the astronaut documentary In the Shadow of the Moon for $2.5 million; the Weinstein Co. paid $4 million to win a heated bidding war for the John Cusack drama Grace is Gone, prompting the indie film company's head, Harvey Weinstein, to tell the Hollywood Reporter, "F--- it. I'm good...
...Three other boys stood out. Neil had irrepressible high spirits and a budding wanderlust. If he couldn't be an astronaut, he said, "I'm going to take people to the country, and sometimes to the seaside." Bruce, an angelic blond boy with a solemn demeanor, came from a well-to-do family but, having been exiled to a boarding school in Surrey, radiated loneliness and idealism. "My heart's desire," he said soulfully, "is to see my daddy." His father was in Rhodesia, which may have had something to do with his stated ambition to go to Africa...
Flotsam and jetsam in Earth orbit, most of it the residue from old satellite explosions, is so profuse that former astronaut John Glenn, on observing the sun glinting off the pieces, once likened it to flying through a cloud of lightning bugs. But given NASA's heightened safety awareness since the 2003 loss of Space Shuttle Columbia, one piece of debris - caught on video and measuring just 2 inches by 5 inches - was enough to cause another high-profile hitch in a series of operational setbacks for Space Shuttle Atlantis...